Ivan Sobolev's blog on building relationships with people

A short note on the language of the blog

I was born and spent most of my life in Kiev which is ~50% Russian speaking. Thus this blog initially started in Russian language (you can see the oldest content is in Russian).

After a while I’ve decided to use it as a vehicle in my English learning. Thus English became primary language here (most of the articles to this day are in English). You’ve probably seen some posts tagged Russian genome and Ukrainian genome being translations from the corresponding languages.

I live in Ukraine so at some point I’ve decided to speak Ukrainian. The crowd I was hanging out with at that time was not really appreciative of the fact and I was constantly reminded of my accent. With time I switched back to Russian.

In the end of 2015 I switched back to Ukrainian again. This time is sticks better with me. I still suck at pronouncing certain words but I’ve developed routines for enjoying that too.

The office crowd (~50 people) was highly supportive, though and it became a kind of entertainment. For a long time I was the only Ukrainian speaking in our Odessa office (Odessa has much more Russian speaking people).

As I always aim at killing a few birds with one stone, I’ve started to use this blog as a means to improve my Ukrainian.

I use Polylang wordpress plugin to maintain multiple language versions of my posts. It is ought to show language flag only when a translation is available. In practice it shows those more often then necessary and when you try to click for your version of a particular blog post you might end up in the home page for the language just because the post was not translated. This sucks.

I won’t be fixing this for quite a while meaning people aiming at Russian will suffer :( I don’t like like people suffering so aiming at alleviating that with at least some sort of explanation. Here we go.

Imagine person from Britain walking with a person from France, they both talk their own language and both understand each other? – That’s what we mostly have in Ukraine now. My friends understand Ukrainian, I understand Russian so we give each others comfort of staying with the language of our choice.

Ukrainian thus becomes my primary language here too and English is a backup for the rest of the world.